Lae

Everyone who’d been to Lae before me described it the same way: PNG’s second city, its industrial heart, the port everything moves through on its way somewhere else. All true, and all a little unfair, because it undersells a place that I found more interesting than its reputation suggested. Lae sits at the mouth of the Markham River on the Huon Gulf, ringed by mountains that stay wrapped in cloud most mornings, and the working port energy — container cranes, PMV buses honking through roundabouts, market vendors calling out prices — gives it a texture closer to a real, lived-in city than the more curated feel of some tourist-facing towns elsewhere in the country.

The Lae Botanical Gardens, tucked improbably close to downtown, hold one of the most significant orchid collections in the Pacific — PNG has somewhere around 3,000 native orchid species, more than almost anywhere on Earth, and a good chunk of that diversity is represented here in a shaded, quiet compound that felt like stepping into a different climate entirely. I spent two hours wandering paths lined with orchids I couldn’t begin to name, watched over by a groundskeeper who clearly loved his job and kept stopping me to point out specimens I’d have walked straight past.

Lae’s WWII history runs deep — it was a major Japanese air base and later a critical Allied staging point, and Amelia Earhart took off from Lae’s airstrip on the last leg of her flight before she disappeared over the Pacific in 1937, a fact the town commemorates quietly rather than turning into a spectacle. The old wartime airstrip is still visible, folded now into the modern airport’s surroundings, and standing near it gave me a strange, quiet jolt I hadn’t expected from what I’d assumed was just a transit stop.

I ate well in Lae, better than expected — a proper Malaysian-run noodle shop near the market did a laksa that undid three days of instant coffee and biscuits in one sitting, and I went back twice.

When to go: Lae is workable year-round as a transit hub, but May through October brings the driest, most pleasant weather for exploring on foot. It’s PNG’s main gateway to the Highlands Highway and a common jumping-off point for Wau and the Huon Peninsula.